1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer network environments, and more specifically to compatibility between heterogeneous systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Web servers maintain logs which record incoming requests and attempts to gain access to the servers. These access logs can be saved in various formats. For example, Microsoft's Information Server (IIS) provides four different formats in which the access log may be saved (IIS, NCSA, W3C, or ODBC). However, saving access logs in different formats presents a problem when servers must communicate with machines which do not use the same format(s). Organizations with heterogeneous sets of web servers which do not support the industry standard Common Log Format (CLF) cannot exchange data with other products. Some existing products require input data to be in CLF.
Web servers which do not support CLF cannot be added as support web servers for system that use different formats. Currently, there is no generic method for converting different server access log formats into CLF without the need for specific code for each type of log file format.
Therefore it would be desirable to have a generic method for converting a minimum set of required data (host, date, URL and status) into CLF without special code for each type of log file format.